Michael Robotham: Shatter

‘I saw Dad on TV. Just now… on the news.’

‘You never watch the news,’ says Julianne.

‘Sometimes I do. A woman jumped off a bridge.’

‘Your father doesn’t want to be reminded…’

I lift Emma from the car. She immediately wraps her arms around my neck like a koala clinging to a tree.

Charlie continues telling Julianne about the news report. Why are children so fascinated by death? Dead birds. Dead animals. Dead insects.

‘How was school?’ I ask, trying to change the subject.

‘Good.’

‘Learn anything?’

Charlie rolls her eyes. I have asked her this same question every afternoon of every school day since she started kindergarten. She gave up answering long ago.

The house is suddenly filled with noise and industry. Julianne starts dinner while I bath Emma and spend ten minutes looking for her pyjamas while she runs naked in and out of Charlie’s room.

I call downstairs, ‘I can’t find Emma’s pyjamas.’

‘In her top drawer.’

‘I looked.’

‘Under her pillow.’

‘No.’

I know what’s going to happen. Julianne will come all the way upstairs and discover the pyjamas sitting right in front of me. It’s called ‘domestic blindness’. She yells to Charlie. ‘Help your father find Emma’s pyjamas.’

Emma wants a bedtime story. I have to make one up involving a princess, a fairy and a talking donkey. That’s what happens when you give a three-year-old creative control. I kiss her goodnight and leave her door partly open.

Supper. A glass of wine. I do the dishes. Julianne falls asleep on the sofa and apologises dreamily as I coax her upstairs and run her a bath.

These are our best nights, when we haven’t seen one another for a few days; touching, brushing against each other, almost unable to wait until Charlie is in bed.

‘Do you know why she jumped?’ asks Julianne, slipping into the bath. I sit on the edge of the tub, trying to keep contact with her eyes. My gaze wants to drift lower to where her nipples are poking through the bubbles.

‘She wouldn’t talk to me.’

‘She must have been very sad.’

‘Yes, she must have been.’

Midnight. It is raining again. Water gurgles in the downpipes outside our bedroom window, sliding down the hill into a stream that has become a river and covered the causeway and stone bridge.

I used to love being awake when my girls were sleeping. It made me feel like a guardian, watching over them, keeping them safe. Tonight is different. Every time I shut my eyes I see images of a tumbling body and the ground opens up beneath me.

Julianne wakes once and slides her hand across the sheets and onto my chest, as if trying to still my heart.

‘It’s all right,’ she whispers. ‘You’re here with me.’

Her eyes haven’t opened. Her hand slides away.

At six in the morning I take a small white pill. My leg is twitching like a dog in the midst of a dream, chasing rabbits in its sleep. Slowly it becomes still. In Parkinson’s parlance, I am now ‘on’. The medication has kicked in.

It is four years since my left hand gave me the message. It wasn’t written down, or typed or printed on fancy paper. It was an unconscious, random flicker of my fingers, a twitch, a ghost movement, a shadow made real. Unknown to me then, working in secret, my brain had begun divorcing my mind. It has been a long drawn-out separation with no legal argument over division of assets- who gets the CD collection and Aunt Grace’s antique sideboard?

The divorce began with my left hand and spread to my arm and my leg and my head. Now it feels as if my body is being owned and operated by someone else who looks like me only less familiar.

When I look at old home movies I can see the changes even two years before the diagnosis. I’m on the sidelines, watching Charlie play football. My shoulders are canted forwards, as though I’m braced against a cold wind. Is it the beginning of a stoop?

I have been through the five stages of grief and mourning. I have denied it, ranted at the unfairness, made pacts with God, crawled into a dark hole and finally accepted my fate. I have a progressive, degenerative neurological disorder. I will not use the word incurable. There is a cure. They just haven’t found it yet. In the meantime, the divorce continues.

I wish I could tell you that I’ve come to terms with it now; that I’m happier than ever before; that I have embraced life, made new friends and become spiritual and fulfilled. I wish.

We have a falling-down cottage, a cat, a duck and two hamsters, Bill and Ben, who may in fact be girls. (The pet shop owner didn’t seem exactly sure.)

‘It’s important,’ I told him.

‘Why?’

‘I have enough women in my house.’

According to our neighbour, Mrs Nutall (if ever a name suited…) we also have a resident ghost, a past occupant who apparently fell down the stairs after hearing her husband had died in the Great War.

I’m always amazed by that term: The Great War. What was so great about it? Eight million soldiers died and a similar number of civilians. It’s like the Great Depression. Can’t we call it something else?

We live in a village called Wellow, five and a half miles from Bath Spa. It’s one of those quaint, postcard-sized clusters of buildings, which barely seem big enough to hold their own history. The village pub, the Fox amp; Badger, is two hundred years old and has a resident dwarf. How rustic is that?

We no longer have learner drivers reversing into our drive or dogs crapping on the footpath or car alarms blaring in the street. We have neighbours now. In London we had them too but pretended they didn’t exist. Here they drop by to borrow garden tools and cups of flour. They even share their political opinions, which is a total anathema to anyone living in London unless you’re a cab driver or a politician.

I don’t know what I expected of Somerset but this will do. And if I sound sentimental, please forgive me. Mr Parkinson is to blame. Some people think sentimentality is an unearned emotion. Not mine. I pay for it every day.

The rain has eased to a drizzle. The world is wet enough. Holding a jacket over my head I open the back gate and head up the footpath. Mrs Nutall is unblocking a drain in her garden. She’s wearing her hair in curlers and her feet in Wellingtons.

‘Good morning,’ I say.

‘Drop dead.’

‘Rain might be clearing.’

‘Fuck off and die.’

According to Hector, the publican at the Fox amp; Badger, Mrs Nutall has nothing against me personally. Apparently, a previous owner of our cottage promised to marry her but ran off instead with the postmaster’s wife. That was forty-five years ago and Mrs Nutall hasn’t forgiven or forgotten. Whoever owns the cottage owns the blame.

Dodging the puddles, I follow the footpath to the village store, trying not to drip on the stacks of newspapers inside the door. Starting with the broadsheets, I flick through the pages, looking for a mention of what happened yesterday. There are photographs, but the story makes only a few paragraphs. Suicides make poor headlines because editors fear a contagion of copycats.

‘If you’re going to read ’em here I’ll bring you a comfy chair and a cup of tea,’ says Eric Vaile, the shopkeeper, peering up from a copy of the Sunday Mirror spread beneath his tattooed forearms.

‘I was just looking for something,’ I explain, apologetically.

‘Your wallet, perhaps.’

Eric looks like he should be running a dockside pub rather than a village shop. His wife Gina, a nervous woman who flinches whenever Eric moves too suddenly, emerges from the storeroom. She’s carrying a tray of soft drinks, almost buckling under the weight. Eric steps back to let her pass before planting his elbows on the counter again.